In recent years, many network operations have migrated to data compute servers that execute virtual machines or containers, as these servers have extra computational resources and can handle some amount of network operations. At the same time, however, the processing power of network forwarding elements has dramatically increased and this processing power often remains untapped in many common network deployments. In addition, the packet processing line rates of some of the fastest network forwarding elements are dramatically higher than the computational powers of the data compute servers. Accordingly, it would be beneficial to use the packet processing data plane pipelines of the network forwarding elements to absorb some of the data compute operations from the data compute servers, so that these operations can be performed in the network at dramatically faster rates.